Rock riffs and rock rift: Making up is hard to do

IT'S axiomatic: for every one rock reunion that works, there are four that don't. As Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler come to an uneasy alliance after years of name-calling and general malevolence, there's plenty of bands out there still doing the "Hello Cleveland" thing on a reunion tour and still despising each other as much as they did when they first broke-up.

Perhaps the most famous example is The Eagles, who, on their unasked-for reunion tour in 1994, reportedly had a set of lawyers (one for each Eagle) arguing in the wings before their first comeback show. The lawyers were holding up the show, it is claimed, because of an argument over which Eagle should walk out on stage first and which last.

Close behind them come Simon and Garfunkel, who have gone through periods of bitter animosity yet still insist, every few years or so, on doing the old friends routine when ticket sales are being announced. The feud began when Art Garfunkel started to get all the acclaim for singing Bridge Over Troubled Water. Simon would sit backstage seething while Garfunkel sang it solo to adoring audiences, telling anyone who would listen: "But I wrote the fuckin' song."

Firing somebody from a band, as Anderson did to Butler, doesn't really help when you have to get back in touch with them later for a reunion tour. Lou Reed discovered this to his cost when the Velvet Underground reformed in the early 1990s. Way back in 1968, there had been an all-or-nothing power struggle between Reed and John Cale over the creative ownership of the band. Reed won out and fired Cale. The incident wasn't forgotten and was dragged up again by Cale during the ill-fated reunion, which ended, inevitably, in tears.

John Lydon made the same mistake when he fired guitarist Glen Matlock from the Sex Pistols just before the release of God Save The Queen for being too "annoyingly normal". Furthermore, Malcolm McLaren accused Matlock of "knowing too many Beatles chords". This was despite the fact that Matlock was the only Pistol who was proficient on his instrument and was the band's main songwriter - he wrote Pretty Vacant. He was replaced by the bass virtuoso Sid Vicious. When it came to the Filthy Lucre reunion tour in 1996, Lydon had to do the "sorry about that" thing to get Matlock back in the band.

The Happy Mondays have all fired each other at some stage of their ramshackle, A to Z of drugs, career. At least when they had to shelve past animosities, they admitted that it was only because the taxman had come calling. The resultant tour was perhaps more embarrassing for the fans than the out-of-it band - Ryder was a bloated amnesiac who had to read his "poetry" off a teleprompter and Bez did what he does best - nothing. A few on-stage scuffles and a really, really lousy cover of The Boys Are Back In Town later (it was their comeback single, sweet Jesus), and the Mondays crawled away again.

Replacing someone who is dead is marginally easier than having to entice the sacked one back into the fold. The Doors did it last year when they lassoed the singer from The Cult, Ian Astbury, for a swift round of box-office activity. A review of this show read: "The Doors were truly awful to begin with - a bloated self-important cabaret of pyschedelic fools" before really turning nasty when it came to the new incarnation of the band. The Doors' original drummer, John Densmore, filed a lawsuit to prevent the Astbury-led Doors continuing. Densmore noted, as drummers only can, that "it can't be The Doors without Jim".

Best of all, though, those veterans of apartheid Sun City, Queen, have just roped in a pub rock singer, Paul Rodgers, and brazenly adopted the "Nobody can replace Freddie - by the way, have you met our new lead singer?" stance.